Genetics of coturnix quail egg shell patterns?

[rcstanley]

I've been looking for information on the genetics of the patterns / colors of coturnix eggs. In my limited experience, each quail seems to lay one "style" egg. I've seen speckled, splats, all white, and heard about all blue.

What are the the genetics of the egg shell patterns and colors? Is there somewhere that has a list about what genes are involved and the recessive / dominance of them?

What I'm most interested in is I like the speckle style egg and don't like the splat style egg (it looks like the egg has been pooped on to me). I want to breed for the speckles, but I'm not sure what genes are at play and don't want to set myself up for failure (e.g. two copies are fatal or it's a co-dominate trait so breeding two speckles won't produce other speckles). Although breeding for an egg that's all splats so that it looks like it's a brown egg might be cool as well.

Any one have experience / information on what they've seen? barring that, I'd love to see pictures of your favorite patterns / styles of coturnix quail eggs.

 

[fishforbrains]

I have several Jumbo Browns who all had the same father and are the daughters of 6 other Jumbo Brown hens. The mother hens all make what you call "splats" eggs, but the daughter hens are all over the place-one makes pretty much all-brown eggs, one makes eggs that kind of change from brown at one end to bluish at the other, most make "splats" eggs and one makes "speckles." My mostly-white Texas A&M birds all make pretty speckled eggs. Prettiest quail eggs I've seen came from Valley quail-sort of a pale cream color with perfectly round tan dots.

 

[paneubert]

I don't think it is certain that controlled breeding/genetic selection will cause one bird to always lay one style/type. I used to save the "weird" eggs I would get, and over probably 1,000 eggs I only saw maybe 5 of each that were all blue, all white, or any other rare marking. All the rest were a combo of the classic splat, dots, dark base with splat or dot, light base with splat or dot, etc... Since those "rare" eggs came from birds that normally laid "normal" eggs, I know it was not genetics having them lay all of one type and that they were able to lay all sort of variety depending on how their reproductive system decided to deposit the colors (or not deposit the colors) that day.

I know there are genetics in chickens for producing blue eggs, and celadon is a thing in quail, but I'm not sure how successful you would be in getting an entire line to only "dot" their eggs via selective breeding. But who knows!

 

[fishforbrains]

It might work (aside from the occasional "weird" eggs all quail produce occasionally). If you ONLY selected the very best (however you define best) eggs for hatching, over time I suppose you'd get more quail that laid those. I've met a breeder who only hatched out the biggest eggs, and now claims her lines produce monster eggs (cannnot verify this is true.)

 

[Rubysword]

Maybe you could only set the eggs with the traits you want? It would take a while, but eventually those would be laid more often.

 

[Athena2344]

I have a trio of texas A&M and the two hens lay splat eggs with speckling